Even if you understand the value of getting to know your target customers, fleshing out detailed customer personas isn’t always easy. Following a clear-cut process helps you turn your data into insightful customer profiles.
- Gather existing data – Start learning about your ideal clients by collecting data on your existing clients and leads. Look for trends in demographics, behavior, and interests. Maybe your home remodeling clients are typically older suburbanites with grown children or your industrial plant clients are often middle-aged men who are into fitness. For macro trends affecting your client base, construction market research reports are a good place to look.
- Ask around – Develop a survey for your current and former clients, but don’t limit your questions to their construction-related concerns. Questions about their family status, life goals, hobbies, and media preferences can give you valuable insight. Just try to keep the survey length under 10 minutes. With your best clients, conduct more in-depth surveys individually, either by phone or email. Then survey your employees to find out if they’ve noticed any trends.
- Spot the trends – Review your data for overarching trends you can use to segment your clients into broad groups. These will form the basis of your customer personas. Between three to five is enough. If you offer several types of services, such as home renovation, manufacturing facility construction, and retail construction, create a generalized customer profile for each. If you’re highly specialized, create more narrowly defined customer personas, such as one for your textile manufacturing facilities clients and another for printing facilities clients.
- Build your personas – Give each customer persona a name and create a profile that includes their demographic data, such as age, sex, occupation, and income level. Then add information about their motivations and interests, such as their job responsibilities, and their career and personal goals and challenges. Finally, fill in details about their personal habits and beliefs. It’s these details that bring your customer personas to life, giving you a clearer picture of how to connect with your ideal clients.